Trigger warnings for this part: gruesome cat death. Do not read if this will adversely affect you.

This is a work of semi-autobiography and therefore should be considered fiction. Names and events have been altered. "Seven Years Bad Luck" is an ongoing series. This is part one.

2012

When I was a kid, I felt lucky. I was lucky, though not always in the way I believed. I was born in the United States (already I’m doing pretty well). I’m white, female, mostly straight maybe (what even is sexuality), and lived in a community that was comfortable with that identity. My family was well-off, I grew up in a town where gangs were almost unheard of and there were only one or two fights in my high school per year. Pretty lucky.

When I was a kid I didn’t have the perspective to understand that big-picture kind of luck. I felt lucky in that special way that kids feel, the way you feel when you still have that kind of childhood ego. Good things happened to me daily, I felt. Overall, my life had a smooth path, and whenever some minor trouble would come up -- forgotten homework, underprepared for a recital -- something would happen and everything works out. I carried around a little bit more good luck than most people.

That belief vanished when I ran over a black cat on Halloween.

It wasn’t my first animal murder by car, but it was definitely the most harrowing.

I was driving back home with my best friend. We had just decided to go ahead and end the Halloween outing at 10 o’clock because no one was dancing at Seville, neither of us were looking to hook up, and I’d been feeling off from the beginning of the night, weird and flat.

In the dark, the cat was invisible until it came into my headlights, darting in from the left.

A quick thump -- my friend screeching from the front seat. Glancing in the mirror, I see the cat jumping, flopping in the light of another oncoming car, lying on its side and then popping up, like popcorn in a frying pan.

Pulling into a nearby parking lot, I turn around, heart pounding and mouth dry. I hesitate, wondering whether I should go back. Kelly sees me slow down, and she tells me loudly, sobbing, that we have to go back. So we go. I don’t know what to do, but I don’t want to leave it either.

We cross the road again and pull into the parking lot of a motel. We scramble out of the car, Kelly sobbing in that way she has where it sounds just like an old-fashioned actress crying: "boohoo boohoohooooo." We scurry out into the road when the coast is clear. Even now, I automatically hold down my skirt, because I had gotten an outfit that was too short and the tan “booty shorts” I had bought with it turned out to be more like underwear.

Surrounding the cat, Kelly waves her hand over it and cries louder. Less shy, I go further and gently touch its long-haired side. Its eyes had popped out of its head, looking like carrots lying across its cheek. I’ve seen that in Halloween decorations before. I had no idea that was realistic.

'Must’ve run over its head,' I realize. 'That would explain the weird jumping.'